Rwanda among most resilient economies, World Bank report

Rwanda and six other African countries have exhibited economic resilience in recent past that saw them post annual growth rate above 5.4 per cent in 2015-2017, this is according to a new World Bank report released on Wednesday.

According to the latest Africa’s Pulse, a bi-annual analysis of the state of African economies conducted by the World Bank, the six others countries include Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Senegal and Tanzania.

The World Bank said, these countries’ economies, registered upswing in economic performance partly on account of strong domestic demand.

The region is showing signs of recovery, and regional growth is projected to reach 2.6% in 2017. However, the recovery remains weak.

Adding that the countries house nearly 27% of the region’s population and account for 13% of the region’s total GDP.
Rwanda’s economy grew by 5.9 per cent in 2016, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics of Rwanda (NISR). Economic growth in Sub-Saharan Africa is rebounding in 2017 after registering the worst decline in more than two decades in 2016, the Bank said.

“The region is showing signs of recovery, and regional growth is projected to reach 2.6% in 2017. However, the recovery remains weak, with growth expected to rise only slightly above population growth, a pace that hampers efforts to boost employment and reduce poverty,” the WB said.

Nigeria, South Africa, and Angola, the continent’s largest economies, are seeing a rebound from the sharp slowdown in 2016, but the recovery has been slow due to insufficient adjustment to low commodity prices and policy uncertainty, it added.

Furthermore, the WB says, several oil exporters in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) are facing economic difficulties.